LILY MORRISSEY

Painter working in River Studios

About Lily

Lily is a painter and cross disciplinary artist, with a BA of Fine Arts from the National Art School, Sydney. Formally trained in painting, Lily has taken an experimental approach to her work which has led her to combine printmaking and painting, and to extend her practise into three dimensions. Formally, her paintings draw from images of the built environment. Via screen printing, she employs repetition to create digital, map like structures in which two dimensional and three dimensional spaces exist simultaneously.
Geometry, shape, line, colour and the use of monograms and symbols occur as frequent subjects of her works. The abstract concept and evolution of cities is a recurring theme across all mediums, and is the main focus of her research project, 'Floating Metropolis'. With a diverse background ranging from environmental journalism to involvement in the Sydney underground warehouse sub-culture, Lily brings to her work an unrelenting fascination with the intersection between culture and the built environment.
Inspired by ideas ranging from postmodern architecture to Malevich, spatial theory, graffiti, Google Earth and ancient history, her works attempt to capture via abstraction a profound sense of the ordered chaos of our present condition, as human animals suspended in a web of late capitalism, renovating homes in our global city, simultaneously existing in an ancient past and a digital future.

What attracted you to the space and what makes the studio suitable for your practice?

I came to River Studios because of the huge community of professional artists. Contrary to the stereotype, art is never made in isolation. Like bacteria, artists thrive when attached to an organism. My studio is ideal for me. It is large and industrial, in the belly of an ex factory. That is where I find my happy place, in grime and paint.